Too Old Too Poor, Tea and Tonks
by PrincessCharmed15
Summary: A snippet of the conversation that Harry and Dumbledore interrupted. Things are getting too much for Tonks as she battles to keep her feelings for Remus Lupin to herself, but has years of giving tea and sympathy left Molly Weasley able to guess?


Nymphadora Tonks nursed a cup of tea in her hands, the sleeves of her cardigan pulled down over her fingers, the hot swirls of steam circling up above her face, making her features undistinguishable and blurred. It wasn't just this that made her face look drawn, but the deep dark circles under her eyes and her sallow expression gave her the look of someone newly drowned. Molly watched her from the side board with worry, her brow furrowed. Grasping her own cup of tea she pulled out the rickety wooden chair and tapped sporadically on the table top.

"You're going to have to tell me who it is,"

Nymphadora's expression remained blank, staring without mood at her own hands.

"I can't" she said quietly.

Molly leant back in her chair, deciding to take a different route, one that had never failed her yet. "Nymphadora," she said sternly, "if you don't tell me who it is this instant I-"

"I'm not one of your children, Molly" said Nymphadora simply.

Molly looked frankly shocked that her 'stern voice' which had scared many a boy-child of her own in to doing her bidding, had had no effect on the wiry twenty-something. She just couldn't understand her. She'd opened her back door half an hour ago to a sodden Tonks, dressed in a grey shirt that hung limp over her tiny frame, and a pair of faded leggings that had obviously belonged to someone long since dead. Her usually vivid hair hanging like curtains, stuck to her face with rain which was dripping down her usually fresh and animated face, which now resembled that of a wet fish, trembling with cold and whispering, "I had no where else to go".

"Do you love him?" said Molly tentatively, back in the present. The question hung in the air, as Tonks' troubled face seemed to digest it, she nodded slowly.

"More than anything"

"Does he love you?"

Tonks looked from underneath the mousy fringe which had dried in odd directions, her deep set eyes brimming with tears. "What he says, and how he acts are two different things"

Molly wondered how this answered the question, but encouraged Tonks to continue, as this was the most she had got out of her all night.

"Sometimes I think he must, and then other times, I think, if he really did, the rest of the world wouldn't matter and it would just be the two of us and to hell with what people think. So he cannot love me"

Molly traced the patterns on the table, avoiding eye contact with the trembling woman, who's exertion of this snippet of information had seemed to scare her.

"and what would the rest of the world think?" she said carefully.

Tonks pushed back her hair with her pale hand, her nails chipped and there was a glimpse of the old her, but then just as fleetingly as it had appeared, it was gone.

"that he is too old, too poor, too d-"

Suddenly there was a crash outside and a yelp from someone who seemed to have knocked something over by accident. Molly's heart skipped a beat, Harry and Dumbledore weren't expected till morning and all the family were accounted for. She had a horrible vision of poking her head round the corner to her sitting room and finding You-Know-Who sitting on her sette reading the paper.

"Who is there?" asked Molly, frightened.

"It is I, Dumbledore, escorting Harry...Ah, hello Tonks!"

Dumbledore's wrinkled, kind looking face appeared in the doorway, the figure of a wiry bespectacled boy lingering in his wake. Molly's heart felt like it disappeared down back in to its cavity, and was no longer residing in her throat. Dangerous times.

"Wotcher" Tonks hardly lifted her head, her heart shaped face full of woe and worry. Molly went to embrace her but she jumped up, her hands trembling, missing the mug by a fraction.

"Thanks for the tea and Sympathy, Molly" she nodded unsmiling and shuffled out of the door. Dumbledore had started talking, Harry had come in, looking underfed and pale as usual when the Dursleys had been looking after him, and Tonks had disappeared. Molly busied herself with fussing over Harry, offering drinks, being the hostess but something odd was playing on her mind.

Too old, too poor…

It couldn't be.


End file.
